Seto Kaiba

Y'see... this is why I said you're wasting your time. No matter what you say, they're never going to realize that their arguments are complete and utter garbage, let alone acknowledge it. You're certainly welcome to ask them how they think the animation supports their ridiculous nonsense, but don't expect anything more than the same pants-on-head retarded arguments and the sort of twisted logic normally reserved for recent victims of Do-It-Yourself brain surgery. Really, no matter what you do they're going to try and spin it as a victory for them. It's the only kind of victory they'll ever have, since the odds of them outsmarting anyone capable of rational thought are virtually zero. Let's face it, you ARE arguing with people who are frequently outsmarted by the shift keys on their keyboards and/or are completely unable to figure out how to work a spellchecker. You are having a battle of wits with UNARMED men, Beltane. I suppose so... but only if you thought Beevis and Butthead was the very height of intellectual humor. I don't find them funny, but a lot of what they do is genuinely facepalm-worthy. Oh, no need to apologize. What little hate-mail I've gotten from Robotech fans that could be deciphered has always been hilarious reading. I've gotten a couple where the author was clearly so angry at me that his already lamentably bad writing skills deteriorated to the point where I spent twenty minutes asking if anyone recognized what language it'd they had been written in before someone pointed out it was just REALLY bad English. On the rare occasions I do receive hate mail for what I say about Robotech, I usually print it off and tack it up to the corkboard behind my desk as a trophy of sorts, right next to my collection of product documentation with atrocious "engrish".

Granted, you've got a point... My advice to you, Beltane... don't waste any more of your time on those idiots. None of them have the maturity or the knowledge to hold a rational debate, they just want to pretend they're experts by bullshitting and trying to shout down the people who actually know what they're talking about. If you're absolutely desperate to get your fix of mindless and nonsensical bullshit, just turn on C-SPAN. Otherwise, your time would be much better spent on communities populated with more reasonable, rational people... like MacrossWorld. Eh, most of Sentinels has already been ruled out. Just a few small elements were included to appease the fans who wanted to see a continuation of Sentinels. The way Prelude was put together essentially excludes a lot of the material in the comics and novels.

Handle that gag with care, it's an antique. Indeed... it's nice to see that amateur dramatics week is over and we can get back to business as usual. I expert you're right, that part of the reason some Robotech fans get butthurt over what we say here is because our observations don't just make Robotech look bad, their factual basis is such that they're almost impossible to refute. It's not just Robotech fans with personal agendas who take umbrage, it's also the fans who want to keep living under a rock and believing all the hype and bullshit Harmony Gold puts out about Robotech.

It's not like that's a new development, particularly where Robotech is concerned. Just before the release of the new edition of the Robotech RPG, the mooks running Robotech.com had a dice roll system added to certain parts of their forums so people could play the game online. Thus far, nobody has ever actually managed to get a game going there. The few people who tried to start games there gave up due to insufficient interest, and people coming in from Palladium's boards to recruit people never had any luck either. The few Robotech RPG games running online are mainly on RPOL, and they use the old 1st Edition books so their players can just download the books in PDF form instead of buying the new editions. The majority of Robotech fans who buy the books do so not with the intent of playing the game, but with the intent of using the book as an encyclopedia/tech manual of sorts, since apart from Robotech Art 1, Harmony Gold has never really bothered with such things. The "2nd Edition" of RPG is particular popular for this purpose, since the books are supposedly vetted by Tommy Yune before going to print. It's safe to say the biggest group playing the Palladium Robotech RPG are using it (or the Macross II equiv.) in order to play Macross-based games with revised rules and less ridiculous mecha stats. It certainly wouldn't be the first time Tony Stark got an add-on for his Iron Man armor that looked like a well-known mecha... I remember seeing pics circulate of an add-on he used against The Hulk that looked suspiciously like the RX-78GP03 Dendrobium Orchis, except scaled down to replace the GP03 Stamen unit with his Iron Man armor. While this will probably shock the hell out of Gubaba, both of the above statements are entirely correct (to the best of my knowledge). I remember this was actually the source of a fair bit of griping on Robotech.com after Prelude was released, which killed off most of the Macross characters left in the series and eliminated the possibility of Sentinels novel characters appearing, like Breetai's lover Kazianna Hesh and their child, Max and Miriya's second daughter Aurora, and Rick and Lisa's son Roy.

You're preaching to the choir dude... and you're entirely right that the Robotech fandom has a lot of fans who are pushing their own personal agendas. If it hadn't come from a trustworthy and reasonably well-connected guy who used to be a convention organizer, and been corroborated by a number of other fans who I trust, I would've immediately thrown it out as hearsay. I'll say this much, it's certainly plausible enough given Palladium's history of tracing art for their books and mixing stuff in that doesn't belong... the DYRL lineart in the first Robotech RPG book being just one example... and after a cursory examination of the artist's work on Palladium's games and Battletech, it beggars belief.

It's one thing to be laid off because the company you work for has fallen on hard times or is overstaffed, it's quite another to be fired for defying your employer and endangering his business. Unless it's a discrimination thing, nobody's gonna talk about the former, but the latter is almost guaranteed to cause a scandal. Considering what Kevin Long allegedly did, that the reasons for his dismissal were not made public is probably more than he deserved. What I've heard from the oldest of the old-time Robotech fans is that the reason for Kevin Long's dismissal from Palladium Books was that while working on one of their licensed properties, he was caught tracing copyrighted art from publications the management had told him were entirely off-limits and couldn't be used. I've also heard that he was later dismissed from another job (which I believe was doing art for a Battletech rulebook) because he had been caught tracing copyrighted art instead of drawing his own material.

Let's not split hairs here hulagu, for all practical purposes the "original" Robotech series is little more than a legitimized bootleg with a really bad Hong Kong translation, and every sequel attempt with the possible exception of the Robotech 3000 series has had all the artistic integrity of Space Gundam V, relying almost exclusively on stuff from shows they don't own (esp. Macross), altered JUST enough to avoid a copyright infringement lawsuit. Oddly, I had that exact same situation in reverse when a Japanese friend of mine in grad school saw someone with a bad Shadow Chronicles desktop background and thought it was Mospeada.

I know we've been over this in this thread a few times, but I guess once more wouldn't hurt... I've talked to Palladium and gotten a fairly reasonable explanation for exactly why there's so much completely ridiculous and wildly inaccurate stuff in the licensed Robotech and Macross II Palladium RPGs. It's not that they didn't TRY, it's mainly a lack of support from the owner of the licensed property in the case of RT, and a case of inadequate source availability in the case of the Macross II game. HG basically fobbed them off with a highly inadequate packet of information and left them to pay out-of-pocket to have official Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospeada artbooks translated, and go frame by frame through the footage looking for clues. In the case of Macross II, they had almost no artbooks to work from, so they had to go almost exclusively on the animation. I'd guess since there was no animation for the Sentinels series beyond the "movie" made from what little footage they had, it was likely entirely down to whatever they could scrounge from Harmony Gold's notes. More like rejected monster designs from A Pup Named Scooby-Doo. Let us not forget Dr. Lang's amazing Robot unicorn/pegasus.

Since the show's main theme is failure, does that mean 21's failure has come full circle and now he's a failure at being a failure? This is some seriously Zen poo now. I missed the episode when it went to air because the cable was out, but I caught it on adultswim.com when they posted it the following Monday, and I was pleasantly surprised. A lot of season 4 hasn't really thrilled me, but I liked "The Better Man" and this latest episode was IMHO the best of the season so far. Brock's back, that business from the first episode of the season is explained, and they've finally stopped fixating on jokes about Sergeant Hatred being a pedophile.

Well, the whole business with the more advanced VF-1 in DYRL being a block revision of the TV series VF-1 implementing controls developed for the VF-4 is a main continuity issue only... I've never been able to find anything to suggest it also holds true for the Macross II continuity. Rather, since the parallel world continuity treats DYRL as the only correct version of Space War 1, the TV series version of the VF-1 probably doesn't exist at all in that timeline, or if it does, likely only as an early-generation prototype or something. (The continuity makes note of small numbers of VF-1As being built specifically for evaluation prior to mass production) On mechanic sheet SDF:M UNS 01A, Macross Chronicle gives the TV series version of the Macross in storm attacker mode, which shows it as being pretty much exactly 1,200m tall to the top of the spikes on the main cannon, whereas the Battle-7 is given explicitly as 1,177m tall, which is so close as to make no odds. The back side of mechanic sheet MF Civ 01A gives the exact height of the Macross Quarter's storm attacker mode as 316m, which agrees nicely with the front side size comparison showing it as almost exactly the same height as the Eiffel Tower (324m).

In hindsight, it really is a shame that Robotech II: the Sentinels got canceled as early as it did. If the reception the various other incarnations of the series got and the fanbase's general antipathy for it are anything to go by, it probably would've been the final nail in Robotech's coffin... a series so piss-dribblingly awful that even the hardcore fans of Robotech often have nothing but scorn for it. One could argue that what's kept Robotech alive these last 20+ years has been that Harmony Gold's various failed sequels all crashed and burned either in development or the earliest stages of production, which allowed fans to look back on those projects and see an ideal of the show that might have been rather than the show that was actually made, and continue to hope that Harmony Gold would one day deliver a sequel that would meet their increasingly ridiculous expectations. Had one of their earlier attempts at a sequel survived production and made it to release before going down in flames, Robotech probably would've died with it. Kabarrians, actually...

If you consider the scope of the larger debate, it already has... several times, albeit not quite in the way you're expecting. For a while there, the belligerent and overly-defensive in the Robotech fandom were finding all sorts of colorful ways they could call people with dissenting opinions "Nazis". I remember back before I got banned from RT.com I was hounded across the boards by this one guy who apparently took umbrage when he posted his own take on what the Robotech continuity should look like in someone else's timeline question and I politely pointed out that there was already an official continuity and that the handful of unrelated "real robot" shows he'd worked into his take on the timeline had no business being there because they had nothing to do with Robotech, which was apparently news to him. So of course, he hounded me across the boards for like two weeks calling me a "posting Nazi" and all sorts of other amusing permutations on "<something> Nazi" until people started telling him to STFU. I've heard a fair few comparisons drawn between the administration stylings of Steve Yun, Tommy Yune, and Kevin McKeever and those of Joseph Stalin... particularly in terms of their philosophy that "man is the root of all problems, get rid of the man, get rid of the problem", but no Nazi parallels drawn yet.

IMHO, locking this thread won't really achieve anything that couldn't be achieved just as easily by enforcing a change of subject. Some people just don't want to let it go, so they quote the posts by the belligerent few and post big, long, wordy responses that provoke further belligerent behavior... lather, rinse, repeat. Best solution is to address the ones who'll at least try to debate in a civil and logical fashion, and ignore the rest outright instead of trying to make them see sense. A lock on this thread is no guarantee that the ones determined to start a fight won't just start a fight elsewhere on the site. After all, this thread exists to keep the Robotech-related malarkey confined to one part of the site. So long as we don't sink to their level, I'm happy. Let them come here if they want... we'll give them plenty of rope and if they choose to hang themselves with it rather than make something useful of it, that's their own business.

Yeah, I remember seeing that movie in high school too... of course I went to private school and had a Latin teacher who decided to slack off during homecoming week and show Austin Powers movies in class instead of teaching. Unfortunately, the license under which Harmony Gold obtained the rest-of-world distribution and merchandising rights for Macross is perfectly valid, though their usage of it is nothing short of an ethically-questionable embarrassment. Because they have neither the numbers nor the organization to pull something like that off. They're far too busy with their witch hunts for "Macross Purists", persecuting each other for having different opinions, and indulging in elaborate delusions about how Robotech is wildly popular and Macross is a hopelessly obscure title nobody cares about. Also, it'd have to be the 5th Robotech Bore War, they already have a fourth one.

I think just about everybody is going to agree that this is a phenomenally bad idea that would end up being downright offensive. While rewriting dialogue and characters to conform to ethnic stereotypes might have been an acceptable practice some twenty-five years ago, but for well over a decade now rewrites have been considered bad practice. The primary goal of any good dub is to produce dialogue that flows naturally in its new language and conforms as closely as possible to the original dialogue of the series. After all, these days most anime viewers don't want to receive a dumbed-down or edited version, they want something that resembles the original work as closely as possible... which is one of the main reasons many modern anime fans consider Robotech unwatchable. I'd say there's a pretty good chance that that's true, though I think the main purpose of Edgar was to provide another tie-in to the original series. The show's creators did engage in the same prank on a much larger scale in Macross Frontier, spending an entire episode making it look like Ozma Lee was going to die the exact same way Roy Focker did, and then at the very end of the episode revealing that he was still alive. Luca might be an example of the same gag on a smaller, more persistent scale, since he was the Kakizaki-analogue of the group, and even wore Kakizaki's green colors from DYRL, which had a lot of people marking him for death... yet he lived through the entire series while the Max-analogue (Michel Blanc) got offed. In that light, it doesn't strike me as unreasonable for Edgar's gag about failing to die being a case of subverting the usual trope of the expendable ethnic sidekick.

I would be the Untold Story movie, because I make Robotech fans RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGE.

Yeah, I'd say just the issues with music licensing would be enough to put most potential licensees off of the idea of distributing Macross 7 and Macross Frontier stateside. Didn't someone at AnimEigo (I think it was Robert Woodhead) say something to that effect... that music licensing was likely going to be the main stumbling block with licensing Macross 7 for distribution outside of Japan?

Eh, I'll pass thanks... on those rare occasions I spring for a non-book collectible I usually aim for new or like-new quality unless it's absolutely dirt cheap like all those Robotech comics I picked up for $0.25 an issue at a garage sale a few years back. Ever since I first started digging into it, I've always thought that it was a mixture of Big West not wanting to work with Harmony Gold because of their past encounters and Big West seeing the American anime industry as too insignificant, in terms of the potential profits, to warrant either taking Harmony Gold to court or forming a partnership with them. I remember hearing one of the RT.com moderators (I forget which) saying something about Warner having also gotten the toy rights to the live-action movie in the bargain, though that may just have been idle speculation. As to whether they have exclusive rights to produce toys based on the animated Robotech series, I don't know if they actually have an exclusive contract or if they're just consistently the cheapest possible option. In terms of their product quality, the latter seems likely.

Just my luck there'd be another commonly used acronym for CMS... I'm looking for a content management system for a website, though I won't say no to a Legioss either. Basically, I'm building a replacement for the now-essentially-defunct RobotechX, and I'd like to give it a decent set of features including support for fanfics and fanart galleries and blogs and whatnot.

If only... if only... I find myself pleasantly surprised by how the mere mention that a RT community free of the censorship and spin that seems to be a standard feature on the mainstream RT sites has brought the reasonable fans out of the woodwork. I've mentioned it all of twice on two different websites and I've already received no less than a dozen e-mails asking me when it'll be open. O_o

If I'm not much mistaken, you've already asked this question over in the newbie thread, and you already received an answer. If you need to hear it again, so be it. No, there is no official English dub of Macross Frontier, and there likely never will be. About the best you can hope for at this point is a fansub with English subtitles. There is at least one fandub of the series in the works, but the quality's not going to be stellar due to the limitations in the equipment available, and they've only done a few episodes so far. You're really better off with the subs.

Exactly... now, lol, anybody got any leads on a good, free CMS for that Robotech fansite project I'm helping out with? Seriously... those jerks at phpNuke are charging for their software now, so my best option's gone.

Hey, we were all happily ignoring him until you and Einherjar brought him back up.

Now if that's true then it's just downright WEIRD. I've never seen ANY publication use that color scheme for the VF-2JA except the covers of the Micron Conspiracy comics.

Since this is (at least tangentially) related to Robotech... does anybody know of a good, stable, free CMS? I'm shopping around for one for that Robotech fansite project I'm helping with and not having much luck.